Stephen Downes

According to this article Australia is pressing forward with plans to bar everyone under the age of 16 from accessing social media. As the story reports, "While the last few years have undoubtedly seen young Australians struggling with online misinformation, re-sharing of personal images, cyber bullying and even explicit AI deepfakes of their likeness, the wide-arching ban has been criticised as an overly broad response to such issues." Additionally, the implications of age verification are beginning to sink in. "The technology currently trialled for the initiative would effectively require users of all ages to run through an age assurance check," a plan that has a significant impact on personal privacy, as well as a means to essentially 'lock down' the internet. Via Kate Bowles.

This article outlines (badly) the sorts of changes impacting higher education institutions, but the main focus is on what it calls 'change fatigue', "a state of emotional and physical exhaustion brought on by frequent and intense changes," symptoms of which include 'combativeness', 'agitation', 'incivility' and more (coincidentally the same symptoms created by low pay or toxic work environments - but I digress). The response, called the Energy Commitment Model, is based on the idea that "once an employee reaches a sufficient level of desire, the individual will engage more fully with the change." To me, it reads like a psychological model created by economists (even the diagrams look like economists'). And it's the usual: "additional focus on open and transparent communication regarding self-care and workload management."

The PLC Directory is "a self-authenticating Decentralized Identifier (DID) system which is strongly-consistent, recoverable, and allows for key rotation." It was developed by Blesky and now holds some 20 million or more DIDs created when Bluesky accounts were created. As Laurens Hof argues, it is one of the "chokepoints" in what is intended to be a decentralized system. Bluesky writes, "While PLC originally stood for "placeholder", the system has been in production use for several months (and while) it is conceivable that the method will evolve or be replaced over time by a successor method, we feel that the current system provides value and is worth consideration as a persistent identifier for other applications." But really, what's needed is to decentralize this as soon as possible, with something akin to the Domain Name System (DNS) stat before it gets too large to change. PLC code is here.

I'm always interested when student activities engage with 'real life', because this is where they learn how the world works, and also develop the networks that will help them through life. This interview with Sharowat Shamin about student politics in Bangladesh is a case in point. What's really interesting, though, about the interview is the overlap between all this and the effort to land civil service jobs, where not only is the competition intense, but also "the constitution requires positive actions, like quotas, to help marginalized groups including religious and ethnic minorites." It's not perfect, but then again, Bangladesh has 160 million people in an area the size of southern Ontario.

This podcast episode features an interview with Replit's Amjad Masad. If you're not familiar with Replit, watch the demo starting around the 10 minute mark. Replit is a coding development environment for rapidly developing prototypes. It's also a great learning tool, and all the more so with AI. "Forget the old approach to learning to code," writes Lenny Rachitsky. "The new model involves learning how to interact with AI tools that help you generate and troubleshoot code. In six months, the value of even minimal coding knowledge doubles." Note: this summary is the transcript, so there's no point clicking on the 'Find the Transcript' link.

This item has caused ripples across educator social media (and increasing angst among English teachers). The story is in the headline (which is what a good headline should do). "People now appear unable to reliably distinguish human-out-of-the-loop AI-generated poetry from human-authored poetry written by well-known poets," write the authors, though of course people who have memorized Shakespeare can presumably tell the difference. "Furthermore, people prefer AI-generated poetry to human-authored poetry, consistently rating AI-generated poems more highly than the poems of well-known poets." In fairness, I'm no fan of the well-known poets; give me some contemporary Dylan or Swift any day.